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It's the latest in a series of moves by Sony that should give Amazon pause in the midst of Amazon's Kindle dominance: Sony's getting up to speed, and it's playing directly at many of Amazon and the Kindle's perceived weaknesses. There's plenty of room for an apples-to-apples comparison of e-readers and their technical specifics, but here are some big-picture reasons worth considering:
1. Sony embraces EPUB -- and understands why "DRM-free" is so powerful. EPUB was established by the International Digital Publishing Forum in 2007, and Sony's original Reader was the first e-reading device to support it. Now, most e-readers do -- all except Amazon, which has thus far shunned EPUB and insisted that Kindle and Kindle e-books run on its proprietary technology. Sony's wised up to the fact that e-reading thought leaders can't be so narrow-minded. As Sony's President, Digital Reading Business Division, Steve Haber noted in a Thursday statement: "A world of proprietary formats and DRMs creates silos and limits overall market growth. Consumers should not have to worry about which device works with which store."
2. Sony has name recognition other e-reader makers don't. The problem with much of Amazon's Kindle competition is that it comes from obscure sources -- upstarts like Plastic Logic or Interead.com, for example, that despite promising e-reader devices aren't exactly household names. Sony's not only been in e-reading for a while now -- its original Reader arrived in 2007, same as the first Kindle -- but it's no obscurity, and doesn't have to spend time explaining its background every time it puts out a press release.
3. Sony has variety and lower prices. Amazon's line of Kindles already expanded twice this year, first with the Kindle 2 back in February -- the updated version of the original Kindle -- and then with the Kindle DX, the large-screen version of the e-reader designed with an eye toward textbooks and periodicals. Sony may lack a big-screen analogue to the DX, but it now offers a number of e-readers, including the new PRS-600 Reader Touch Edition and the minimalist PRS-300 Reader Pocket Edition, the latter of which, at $199, bests Amazon's best price for Kindle by $100.
4. Sony seems to know what it has to fix. At the moment, Sony is lacking 3G wireless connectivity on its Readers, which, among some other minor gripes with its Reader line, is probably the most glaring drawback. But there's been quite a bit of speculation that a Sony press conference scheduled for Aug. 25 will present a solution to that problem -- Haber has also hinted as much in various interviews -- with rumors of yet another e-reader on the way.
5. Sony has Google in its corner. Sure, the extent of Sony and Google's public e-book relationship is that Sony offers access to the half-million public domain works of Google's digitized Google Books library. Given all that Google is doing with applications, however -- and mobile applications at that -- why wouldn't Sony attempt to leverage that relationship further to build out what the Readers can offer as mobile devices? Of course, with Google preparing its own digital book ecosystem maybe there won't be much to talk about.
Plenty to chew over. Let us know what you think in the ChannelWeb Connect community.
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